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Years ago, you could get a catalogue from a chemical company and buy whatever you wanted, mail order.
These days even simple chemicals can't be ordered because of people making amphetamines. You can't get even basic chemicals like phosphorous and potassium permanganate. Iodine is another one.

In America, if you are found with the ingredients for making an illegal drug, you will be charged as if you had made it, and you will go to prison for even your first offence. Don't even think of manufacture.

I've never seen any threads on here about making drugs.
Perhaps the site has a policy of not allowing them.
Is that the case moderators?

I was about to make a post in a pharmacology forum and then you mention cyanide.

That's a definite red flag.

Click to expand...

But if one didn't ask dumb questions, ones ignorance couldn't be turned into an adventure!

Cyanides are produced by certain bacteria, fungi, and algae and are found in a number of plants. Cyanides are found, although in small amounts, in certain seeds and stones, e.g. those of apple, mango, peach, and bitter almonds.[8] In plants, cyanides are usually bound to sugar molecules in the form of cyanogenic glycosides and defend the plant against herbivores. Cassava roots (also called manioc), an important potato-like food grown in tropical countries (and the base from which tapioca is made), also contain cyanogenic glycosides.[9][10]

The cyanide radical CN· has been identified in interstellar space.[11]

Hydrogen cyanide is produced by the combustion or pyrolysis of certain materials under oxygen-deficient conditions. For example it can be detected in the exhaust of internal combustion engines and tobacco smoke. Certain plastics, especially those derived from acrylonitrile, release hydrogen cyanide when heated or burnt.[12]

It's naturally occurring in nature, too. But if you're trying to synthesize the molecule in a lab, and you have to add that functional group, you're going to have to deal with something like HCN, which is quite deadly when inhaled. Once it's part of the drug molecule, you're ok, but the precursor molecule, the one you're using in the synthesis, is not safe.